WARREN OLNEY CONFRONTS CARMEN TRUTANICH WITH, YOU KNOW, FACTS REGARDING HIS REALIGNMENT CAMPAIGN ATTACKS AGAINST FEUER

Thursday night’s Which Way LA? with Warren Olney on KCRW featured City Attorney candidates Mike Feuer and incumbent Carmen Trutanich, with each man interviewed for half the show.

More than perhaps any other interviewer or debate moderator during this election season, Olney has consistently asked the most intelligent, probing and illuminating questions of all the candidates who have stepped behind his microphones.

Thursday’s show with the City Attorney candidates was no exception.

However, his segment with Trutanich was a standout, as the ever dignified Olney all but chased “Nuch” around the room (metaphorically speaking), after Trutantich repeated his nonsense about AB109 letting inmates out of prison early, accusing realignment and Mike Feuer of being responsible for putting the Northridge kidnapping suspect on the street so the man could snatch ten-year-old girls….and more.

As we’ve said here, there is a legitimate and important discussion to be had about reforming AB 109 and some of its companion statutes mandating parole and probation reform. But that would require understanding the law in the first place, which Trutanich does not appear to do, and then one would have to deal in…you know, facts.

In the meantime, a hearty thank you to Warren Olney for holding our city attorney’s feet to the factual fire.

NEW STUDY ON PRISON RAPE AND SEXUAL VICTIMIZATION IN LOCK-UPS SHOWS THAT YOUTH ARE 13-21 TIMES MORE LIKELY TO BE SEXUALLY ASSAULTED THAN ADULTS WHEN INCARCERATED

A study released Thursday by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) contained a number of disturbing statistics. But perhaps the most alarming stats have to do with the overall rates of sexual victimization for youth ages 16 and 17 in adult prisons (4.5%) and jails (4.7%), which were significantly higher than those for adults (4.0% in prisons, 3.2% in jails). The report also found that, among kids who reported being sexual victimized by staff, three quarters were victimized more than once, and nearly half said that staff used force or threat of force.

Yet those stats don’t tell the whole story, since kids are much fewer in numbers than adults in lock-up.

According to the highly respected Campaign for Youth Justice, research by BJS shows that 21% and 13% of all substantiated victims of inmate-on-inmate sexual violence in jails in 2005 and 2006 respectively, were youth under the age of 18 (surprisingly high since only 1% of jail inmates are juveniles). Put another way, previous BJS research shows that youth in adult facilities were 13 to 21 times as likely to be sexually assaulted while in custody than their representation in the correctional population.

“This study tells us that youth face sexual victimization in adult institutions, but due to underreporting by youth in challenging adult facility conditions, we need more research to know more about this problem,” says Liz Ryan, President and CEO of the Campaign for Youth Justice (CFYJ). “Previous studies and the experiences of young people in the adult criminal justice system document that youth are at greatest risk of sexual victimization in adult jails and prisons, “The report underscores the urgency for U.S. Attorney General Holder and the nation’s governors to redouble their efforts to fully implement the Prison Rape Elimination Act’s (PREA) (http://www.campaignforyouthjustice.org/preac.html) Youthful Inmate Standard by removing youth under 18 from adult jails and prisons.”

Amnesty International also noted that inmates who identify as LGBT in prisons and jails were at least 2.5 times more likely to be sexually victimized by staff than non-LGBT detainees.

LA’S TWIN TOWERS JAIL SHOWS HIGH RATE OF INMATE ON INMATE SEXUAL ASSAULTS ACCORDING TO THE STUDY

In the study, as you might immagine, some prisions and jails had higher frequencies of sexual abuse than others. The report flagged 11 male prisons, 1 female prison, and 9 jails that it identified as high-rate facilities based on the prevalence of inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization in 2011-12.

LA’s Twin Towers Jail was one of those 9 Jails with the highest rates of sexual assaults, said the report. (SEE PAGES 11 & 12)

AND NOW BACK TO REALIGNMENT: A NEW STUDY INDICATES THAT ARRESTS AND CONVICTIONS REMAIN ABOUT THE SAME AS PRE-REALIGNMENT

A new study released Thursday by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation indicates that, under realignment, post-prison arrests are slightly down, while convictions remain static.

The study followed 37,448 lawbreakers for one year after their release from prison and compared those findings with statistics on 51,910 inmates released in the year immediately prior realignment.

The researchers found that post-Realignment offenders were arrested at a slightly lower rate than pre-Realignment offenders (62 percent pre-Realignment and 58.7 percent post-Realignment).

Key findings include:

* The number of post-Realignment offenders convicted of new crimes is nearly the same as the number of pre-Realignment offenders convicted of new crimes (21.3 percent pre-realignment and 22.5 percent post realignment).

* Post-Realignment offenders returned to prison at a significantly lower rate than pre-Realignment offenders, an intended effect of Realignment as most offenders are ineligible to return to prison on a parole violation. (42 percent pre-Realignment and 7.4 percent post-Realignment)

This last is due to the fact that, prior to realignment, parolees were being returned to prison on technical violations of their parole at a rapid clip. Whereas now, with many parolees, technical violations—things like staying out of their old neighborhoods, testing dirty, and so on—do not result in 9 mos more in prison.

There is additional fine grain stuff in the study itself, so click here, if you want delve deeper into the matter. A lot more study is needed, yet the bottom line take-away from this study is that those who have been shrieking that realignment is causing crime to run rife through the countryside, do not have facts on their side.

FEDERAL OVERSIGHT OF LAPD OFFICIALLY ENDS

The Federal Consent Decrees finally is no more for the LAPD. The AP’s Tami Abdollah has the story. Here’s a clip:

A judge has officially ended more than a decade of federal oversight of the Los Angeles Police Department that was triggered by a corruption scandal involving abusive officers.
In two short sentences, U.S. District Judge Gary Allen Feess dismissed the final remnants of a consent decree on Wednesday, releasing the department from a transition agreement put in place in 2009 to ensure reforms that had been made were kept in place.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa cheered the formal end to agreement at an afternoon news conference with Police Chief Charlie Beck. Villaraigosa said the department, which was once “an example of how not to police a city, is now a national model.”

Tyler Izen, president of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, said the union was pleased the department was free of the federal monitoring.

“Now we can begin looking for efficiencies in LAPD processes while at the same time maintaining the transparency the public deserves,” he said. The union represents nearly 10,000 LAPD personnel.

The city was forced into the consent decree in 2001 under the threat of a federal lawsuit. The U.S. government alleged a pattern of civil rights violations committed by police officers that went back decades.

Now that it’s over, it bears remembering that, as odious as the thing was, the Consent Decree was a tool that Bill Bratton used effectively to begin to institute real reform in the department.

AFTER 4 YEARS OF LAGGING, OBAMA NAMES HEAD OF THE DOJ’S JUVENILE JUSTICE DIVISION (OJJDP)

On Friday, President Barack Obama announced his intent to appoint Robert Listenbee, Jr. as the head of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP). The OJJDP has been without a permanent leader for the past four years (the longest period in its 40 year history), and the lack of a permanent chief for the agency has driven juvenile justice advocates crazy.

We’ll have more on Listenbee shortly, but suffice it to say that the experts we’ve spoken to thus far are very happy with the president’s choice (belated though it may be).

Listenbee, who is a long-time champion of reforms in the juvenile justice system, is the head of the Juvenile Unit at the Defender Association of Philadelphia, a member of the federal advisory council on juvenile justice, and a co-chair of the national blue-ribbon taskforce that examined the effect of childhood trauma from violence on kids.

More soon.

NOTE: The above interview with Listenbee is from 2011.

PRIEST WHO IS ALLEGED SEXUAL ABUSER WENT TO WORK FOR LAUSD AFTER HE LEFT CHURCH, WHICH KNEW OF EXTENSIVE ABUSE ACCOUNTS (GEE, THANKS AGAIN, ARCHDIOCESE!)—UPDATED!

The LA Times reports:

A former priest and suspected child molester left employment with the Los Angeles Archdiocese to work for the L.A. Unified School District, officials confirmed Sunday.

The former clergyman, Joseph Pina, did not work with children in his school district job, said L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy. He added that, as a result of the disclosures, Pina would no longer be employed by the nation’s second-largest school system.

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MONDAY UPDATE: ARCHDIOCESES SAYS IT WARNED LAUSD ABOUT PRIEST

So Cal Connected reports that a spokesman for the Archdioceses says it warned LAUSD about Pina. But read the story. It’s not clear how strenuous the warning was, whether it was a CYA warning (cover your….you know) that may or may not ever have been noticed, or something more open and to the point.

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Over the weekend, Deasy was unable to pull together Pina’s full employment history, but said the district already was looking into the matter of Pina’s hiring.

“I find it troubling,” he said of the disclosures about Pina. “And I also want to understand what knowledge that we had of any background problems when hiring him, and I don’t yet know that.”

SoCal Connected has even more.

Here’s clip from their story:

Joseph D. Pina was a Catholic priest for 26 years in Southern California until he left the church after repeated admissions of a sexual relationship with a minor. “Socal Connected” has learned Pina later went to work at Los Angeles Unified School District.

According to recently released church documents, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles was aware as early as 2009 that Pina was working for LAUSD, despite his extensive record of sexual misconduct as a Catholic Priest. It’s unclear if church leaders informed the district of Pina’s past.

Pina, whose last assignment was at St. Emydius Church in Lynwood, Calif., resigned from the priesthood in March 1998. A review of the LAUSD website shows Pina has worked as a community organizer for the school district as early as February 2002.

Here, by the way, is a link to the statement made on the matter by Archbishop Jose Gomez. While the Archbishop appears genuinely upset, as Steve Lopez wrote in the LA Times, the words just aren’t enough. We need some more substantive action.

WHEN POLICE LIE UNDER OATH

In Sunday’s New York Times features an Op Ed by attorney Michelle Alexander, author of the excellent book, The New Jim Crow.

Here’s a clip:

THOUSANDS of people plead guilty to crimes every year in the United States because they know that the odds of a jury’s believing their word over a police officer’s are slim to none. As a juror, whom are you likely to believe: the alleged criminal in an orange jumpsuit or two well-groomed police officers in uniforms who just swore to God they’re telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but? As one of my colleagues recently put it, “Everyone knows you have to be crazy to accuse the police of lying.”

But are police officers necessarily more trustworthy than alleged criminals? I think not. Not just because the police have a special inclination toward confabulation, but because, disturbingly, they have an incentive to lie…

There’s a lot more here. Whether you agree or not with Alexander, what she has to say has about the incentives to lie is worth reading.

40 YEARS OF ROE V. WADE MARKED WITH RALLIES AND COUNTER RALLIES IN SF AND ELSEWHERE

THere were rallies marking the 40′s anniversary of Roe v. Wade all over the county this past weekend. Matthai Kuruvila from the San Francisco Chron has an account of the rally and counter rally in San Francisco. Here’s a clip:

The account of the events in San Francicso. Abortion activists on each side of the issue converged on San Francisco Saturday, creating parallel universes testifying to what 40 years of reproductive rights have wrought.

At Justin Herman Plaza, pro-choice activists danced and spoke about liberating women from the horror of back alley abortions conducted by coat hanger-wielding quacks.

Before legal abortions, what might happen to you “was a terror in the back of your mind,” said Chris Malfatti, 64, of San Francisco, who knew someone who lost her fertility to an illegal abortion.

Katheryn Smith of Politico covered the events in DC.

RELEASE OF CORONER’S REPORT FUELS CONTROVERSY OVER CULVER CITY MAN SHOT MULTIPLE TIMES BY DEPUTIES

The newly released autopsy report on the shooting death by sheriff’s deputies of Jose De La Trinidad shows that De La Trinidad was shot 7 times, all from the rear, five of the shots striking the Culver City father in the back.

The LA Times Wesley Lowery has more on the story. Here’s a clip:

A Culver City man who was fatally shot by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies after a pursuit in November was struck by bullets five times in the back and once each in the right hip and right forearm, also from behind, according to an autopsy report obtained by The Times.

Jose de la Trinidad, a 36-year-old father of two, was killed Nov. 10 by deputies who believed he was reaching for a weapon after a pursuit. But a witness to the shooting said De la Trinidad, who was unarmed, was complying with deputies and had his hands above his head when he was shot.

Multiple law enforcement agencies are investigating the shooting.

De la Trinidad was shot five times in the upper and lower back, according to the Los Angeles County coroner’s report dated Nov. 13. The report describes four of those wounds as fatal. He was also shot in the right forearm and right hip, with both shots entering from behind, the report found.

“Here’s a man who complied, did what he was supposed to, and was gunned down by trigger-happy deputies,” said Arnoldo Casillas, the family’s attorney, who provided a copy of the autopsy report to The Times. He said he planned to sue the Sheriff’s Department…

THE PRICE OF A STOLEN CHILDHOOD

In a deeply affecting story for this week’s New York Times Magazine Emily Bazelon writes about two young women with the first names of Nicole and Amy who, as children, were sexually abused, with their rapes recorded on video and distributed to thousands of men. In the cases of Nicole and Amy, however,the court has ruled that they can both obtain monetary restitution from those who downloaded the videos of them to mitigate the harm that was done to them. Bazelon’s article explores, among other things, if financial restitution actually helps victims of child pornography.

Here’s a clip:

The detective spread out the photographs on the kitchen table, in front of Nicole, on a December morning in 2006. She was 17, but in the pictures, she saw the face of her 10-year-old self, a half-grown girl wearing make-up. The bodies in the images were broken up by pixelation, but Nicole could see the outline of her father, forcing himself on her. Her mother, sitting next to her, burst into sobs.

The detective spoke gently, but he had brutal news: the pictures had been downloaded onto thousands of computers via file-sharing services around the world. They were among the most widely circulated child pornography on the Internet. Also online were video clips, similarly notorious, in which Nicole spoke words her father had scripted for her, sometimes at the behest of other men. For years, investigators in the United States, Canada and Europe had been trying to identify the girl in the images.

Nicole’s parents split up when she was a toddler, and she grew up living with her mother and stepfather and visiting her father, a former policeman, every other weekend at his apartment in a suburban town in the Pacific Northwest. He started showing her child pornography when she was about 9, telling her that it was normal for fathers and daughters to “play games” like in the pictures. Soon after, he started forcing her to perform oral sex and raping her, dressing her in tight clothes and sometimes binding her with ropes. When she turned 12, she told him to stop, but he used threats and intimidation to continue the abuse for about a year. He said that if she told anyone what he’d done, everyone would hate her for letting him. He said that her mother would no longer love her.

Nicole (who asked me to use her middle name to protect her privacy) knew her father had a tripod set up in his bedroom. She asked if he’d ever shown the pictures to anyone. He said no, and she believed him. “It was all so hidden,” she told me. “And he knew how to lie. He taught me to do it. He said: ‘You look them straight in the eye. You make your shoulders square. You breathe normally.’ ”

When she was 16, Nicole told her mother, in a burst of tears, what had been going on at her father’s house. Her father was arrested for child rape. The police asked Nicole whether he took pictures. She said yes, but that she didn’t think he showed them to anyone…..

The idea of the kind of restitution Bazelon’s story describes is not without controversy. It seems that, as terrible as such crimes are, creating tough laws that don’t also capture in their net the wrong people along with the predators, can be challenging, as Jennifer Bleyer of Slate points out.

THREE STRIKERS NEWLY RELEASED FACE A MULTITUDE OF CHALLENGES, OFTEN WITH NO HELP

Tracey Kaplan at the Contra Costa News has the story. Here’s a clip:

In an unforeseen consequence of easing the state’s tough Three Strikes Law, many inmates who have won early release are hitting the streets with up to only $200 in prison “gate money” and the clothes on their backs.

These former lifers are not eligible for parole and thus will not get the guidance and services they need to help them succeed on the outside, such as access to employment opportunities, vocational training and drug rehabilitation.

The lack of oversight and assistance for this first wave of “strikers” alarms both proponents and opponents of the revised Three Strikes Law — as well as the inmates themselves.

“I feel like the Terminator, showing up in a different time zone completely naked, with nothing,” said Greg Wilks, 48, a San Jose man who is poised to be released after serving more than 13 years of a 27-years-to-life sentence for stealing laptops from Cisco, where he secretly lived in a vacant office while working as a temp in shipping and receiving.

[SNIP]

“We want these people to succeed,” said Michael Romano, director of Stanford’s Three Strikes Project. “We don’t want them committing crimes and creating more victims.”

Proponents say the main reason they didn’t foresee the situation is that the rules regarding parole changed significantly — after officials had already approved the ballot language for Proposition 36.

Under California’s realignment of its criminal justice system, the role of supervising most nonviolent offenders is shifting in stages from the state to county probation officers. But neither the realignment statute nor the Three Strikes Law made provisions for monitoring released strikers.

Romano said the issue is now being litigated in Los Angeles County, where a prosecutor claims strikers should be supervised by probation officers. But even if they are, he said, many counties lack the resources to help the mostly male population of former lifers make a successful transition….

Photo of San Francisco rally for 40 years of Roe v. Wade by Christine Duong